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The photograph of Diomede passed from hand to hand. Ingravallo also gave it a sidelong peep, as if reluctantly, though in reality with a certain secret annoyance: he passed it to Fumi, carelessly: a gesture meant to signify boredom and fatigue, and the desire to go and get some sleep, since it was high time: "one of a thousand like him." Finally after a few more ahas and a few more ahems, after a "But I've already seen it," it was knocked down to Pompeo, author of this last exclamation, who sheltered it in his wallet of simulated alligator, and the wallet he placed over his heart, agreeing in a loud and ringing voice: "Well, we'll do our best." The chief, meanwhile, had motioned to him: "Here," with the little rake of his four fingers of the right hand: and Pompeo had therefore approached: bent, now, he gave ear to the whispers of the seated official, and had already nodded his head repeatedly, looking far into the distance, that is to say, against the papered or opaque panes of the window: which the night's gaze, outside, observed, fearing, venerating. That ear listened, with its habitual zeal: and the doctor dropped those whispers into it, like so many drops of a rare henbane: and the movement of the lips was accompanied by a lively digitation, like a closed tulip, index and thumb in disjunctive oscillation.

At seeing the photo of her beloved take shelter against Grabber's heart, Ines, poor kid, blanched. Over her little nose her saddened eyebrows thickened in a frown that seemed wrath but wasn't: tears glistened, suddenly gleaming, under the very long and golden lashes (through whose comb, once upon a time, to her childish gaze, the glowing Alban light, the light of morning had been broken and radiated). They ran down her cheeks, leaving there, or so it seemed, two white streams, down to her mouth: the trail of humiliation, of alarm. She had nothing with which to blow her nose, nor to dry those tears: she raised her hand as if to stanch with the gesture alone what might have bubbled up from the wretched solitude of her face, to perfect the cruelty of those moments, the chill and derision of the hour which is their sum. She felt as if she were naked, helpless, before those who have the power to pry into the nakedness of shame and, if they don't mock it, they pass judgment on it: naked, helpless: as are all sons and daughters without shelter and without support, in the bestial arena of the earth. The stove was damp. The big room was cold: you could see your breath in it: the light bulbs of the Investigation Squad were governmental. She felt upon herself, shuddering at it, the men's gaze, and the rips, the tears, the wretched bunting, the sordid poverty of her dress: a tramp's jersey. To God, she could surely not address herself, not in these clothes. When he had called her by name, the name of her baptism, three times: Ines! Ines! Ines! at the beginning of her life in the underbrush, three times! like the three Persons of the Holy Trinity . . . the oaks writhed in foreboding under the gusts of the mistral: they opened the path of the underbrush to her, behind the deliberate tread of the boy. When the Lord had called her back, with his gaze of golden rays in the evening, from the round window of Croce domini, she, to the Lord—who had the heart to answer Him? "I'm going with my love," she had answered that gaze, that voice. So as for the Lord, now, He had to be left out of it.

She bowed her head, which, falling over her face, her dry or gluey hair put in the shadow, threatened to hide altogether. Her shoulders seemed to grow thinner, more skeletal almost, in the jerks of a silent sobbing. She dried her face, and nose: with her sleeve. She raised her arm: she wanted to hide her weeping, shelter her fear, her shame. A gap, at the beginning of her sleeve, and another in the undershirt below it, revealed the whiteness of her shoulder. She had nothing to conceal herself, but those torn and discolored remains of a poor girl's dress.

But